The impressive new novel by Booker Prize winner and best-selling author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo.

“John of John has the emotional depth and empathy that characterized his previous works, but this book is special, with a urgent, immediate sense of place, the drama of intense feelings that are suppressed, hidden, and explosively released” - Colm Tóibín

“Reading John of John is like moving to the Isle of Harris and settling into the family estate. The novel is so absorbing, so encompassing, that I felt like I was living inside it. Douglas Stuart has written something incredible and rare” - Ann Patchett

Without money and with only a few glimpses of his training at art school, John-Calum Macleod returns to the Isle of Harris to discover that almost nothing has changed except for him. At the top estate where he grew up, Cal starts his life over, trapped between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a shepherd and weaver, and the pillar of their local Protestant church, and his Glasgow-born grandmother, Ella, who has maintained a fragile peace with her son-in-law for decades.

While Cal wonders if he can find any lonely men on the barren slopes of his home, John is disappointed with his son's long hair and seems unwilling to be saved. As the seasons pass, everything is set to change as the threads connecting the fragile community become increasingly tangled.

John of John is a moving story of a young man's return home and how the bonds of family life are torn apart by the weight of expectation. It confirms Douglas Stuart as one of the most important British authors working today.